How digital technologies can reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector's legacy assets

Abstract

The global community is increasingly committed to transitioning to green energy technologies. However, while the percentage of the worldʼs energy coming from renewables is growing, the absolute amount of energy delivered to the global marketplace in the form of fossil fuels is also getting bigger, causing the International Energy Agency to recently declare that “it is too soon to see a rapid decline of oil.” This realization carries with it some sobering perspective about what needs to be done by the energy industry to mitigate climate change. Based on a keynote address delivered at the United Nations’ “Resource Management Week 2021” conference, this viewpoint argues that, in tandem to sowing the seeds of tomorrow's renewable energy systems, we also need to reduce the emissions from the systems that we have right now because the evidence in front of us strongly suggests that these legacy energy sources will continue to be around for the short- to medium-term future. To this end, this paper highlights four digital technological developments that have the potential to significantly help the oil & gas industry to make progress on this front: (1) continuing the industry's journey to “smartness,” (2) edge computing, (3) the emergence of global data standards for measuring greenhouse gas emissions, and (4) improving the efficiency of digital infrastructure.